Ed Ruscha's Wall Rocket (2013) places two words across the face of a snow-covered mountain in white condensed capitals — WALL above, ROCKET below — each one sitting against rock and ice as though it belongs there, which of course it doesn't. The peak rises from deep navy at the base through layered steel blues to pale upper snowfields, a narrow band of warm peach sky just visible above the summit. The mountain fills almost the entire picture plane, sheer and close, leaving no distance between viewer and subject.

Ruscha drove Route 66 from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles in 1956, nineteen years old, and the American landscape never left his work. But where that journey planted in him a fascination with the roadside — petrol stations, motels, parking structures — the Mountain Series turned his attention to the terrain beyond the highway, the geological formations that predated every sign and structure he had spent decades cataloguing. The mountain here is submitted to the same flat graphic logic as those earlier subjects: not painted from observation, not romanticised, but sourced from photography and reorganised on the picture plane with the even-handedness of someone making a record more so an impression.

The two words don't explain each other and make no attempt to. WALL describes the thing you are looking at — this mountain is emphatically a wall, vertical and obstructing — while ROCKET points in precisely the opposite direction, toward velocity, technology, and the jet-age optimism that ran through California's self-image in the decades Ruscha was forming his. That collision between the ancient and the propulsive, the fixed and the airborne, generates the work's charge. Ruscha had spent his career drawn to language that refuses to settle, phrases that produce friction not a resolution, and this pairing is among his most economical: two words, one surface, no commentary.

By 2013 the Mountain Series had been running for two decades, and Wall Rocket represents the series at its most assured — the palette controlled, the typography confident, the relationship between inscription and terrain exactly as unresolved as Ruscha intended it to be. When he represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2004, it was this quality — an art that looked straightforward and turned out not to be — that defined his standing. Wall Rocket carries that quality in full.

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